


Stars For Friends

by Lohrendrell



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Angry Lambert (The Witcher), Gen, Lambert Deserves Nice Things, Lambert-centric (The Witcher), Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:33:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28406328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lohrendrell/pseuds/Lohrendrell
Summary: He is desperate, drowning in anguish and hollowness, but the Stars pull him above, force him to breathe conjured fresh air, force his lungs to function, until Lambert can do it by himself again.
Comments: 29
Kudos: 50
Collections: The Witcher Flash Fic Challenge: Secret Santa (TWFFSS20)





	Stars For Friends

**Author's Note:**

  * For [disaster_imp](https://archiveofourown.org/users/disaster_imp/gifts).



> My Secret Santa gift for disaster_imp! I **loved** your prompt so much, I hope I did it justice!! Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!!! <3
> 
> [](https://ibb.co/Nr7HgXh%22%3E)  
> 

It always happens at night.

It’s just something Lambert does. Something he’s always done.

When he’s feeling particularly overwhelmed, or annoyed, or just like he wants everything to fucking explode already—really, any kind of turmoil whatsoever—he walks away. He’s learned to do so. It’s better than being combative. He’s learned the hard way that walking around holding the metaphorical bomb with his teeth, just waiting for opportunities to blow it, doesn’t fulfill the hole he feels inside.

He finds his way into the emptiest parts of the Blue Mountains, not quite the mountain top, but high enough that he feels his lungs tighten, feels his breath wanting to escape him.

He finds somewhere in the open because otherwise they might not find him as easily, but he picks a spot still secluded enough that no one else will be able to see them.

He waits.

They find him after a couple of hours of meditation, as they always do.

As they always have done.

——

The first time it happened, Lambert was maybe two or three years old.

(It probably isn’t normal for someone to remember that far back in their youth, but it might just be because he’s a freak—in more than one sense. He remembers it like it happened yesterday.)

His mother had been carrying him on her back, as she often did. Hugging her from behind, in the satchel strapped to her back, Lambert watched his own feet dangling over the dirt in the road. Something about it made for an intriguing image until he got dizzy and had to look away.

It was night. They were later than usual. His mother smelled of the soaps she used to wash the nobleman's clothes. They were going back home (and Lambert remembers, even still, even at such a tender age, how much he did _not_ want to go back home, ever).

When he looked up, feeling nauseated from watching his dangling feet for so long, he saw the Stars.

They didn’t say anything to him that night, but they were fluttering around in a misshapen circle. To his childish mind, it looked like some kind of dancing.

He waved at them.

(He doesn’t know if that’s what started it).

——

He was four the first time they saved his life.

His mother was washing the baron’s clothes by the river, as she did almost every day in order to buy the bread his father didn’t provide.

(He still remembers her rough hands, the smell of soap; the calloused fingers caressing his back, as soothingly as she could in her own distress—he knows now that her priority was to put him to sleep before his father came home.)

Lambert was only a few meters away from her, playing by himself with some rocks he was collecting. He wanted to make a battalion, just like the one he saw the other day, the one that was escorting the pirate king. His soldiers—he would place the smaller rocks behind the bigger ones, because the bigger ones were better at protecting.

The river floor wasn’t even.

Lambert tripped over something—a small depression? A hole? A rock? He would never be sure.

The pull of the current was too strong for a four-year-old, and he was taken away from his mother’s sights in a matter of seconds.

(He doesn’t remember what happened. He doesn’t remember how he made it. He only remembers the flicking lights, and the warmth, and waking up in his mother’s embrace, under the waterfall of her tears.)

(He thinks, in hindsight, that perhaps they enchanted him to forget it all.)

(He’s grateful, somewhat.)

——

They come to him after just a couple of hours of meditation, as they always do.

Lambert feels instantly calm with their presence. They loom over him like tiny little rogue stars in an otherwise dark night. They shield him in an almost circle, surrounding him with their light.

They don’t talk. Not with words. But Lambert understands them.

They ask him, “What’s wrong?”

He says, “What’s _not_ wrong?”

They don’t tell him it’s gonna be okay.

They don’t coddle him. They aren’t like the witchers in the keep, who always lie. That’s why Lambert appreciates them.

——

They weren’t there with him when Vesemir took him to Kaer Morhen.

Perhaps they were too afraid.

——

They said the keep was an inescapable force. They were wrong.

Lambert escaped once.

He was eleven or twelve, probably. He’d lost the count. He kept it before, he knew he was nine when Vesemir brought him to Kaer Morhen, but ever since then, with the constant training and the mushroom-based potions they all had to drink everyday, Lambert lost count.

He would die before admitting to anyone that he was crying. That he was terrified of the trials, terrified of not surviving it and of _surviving_ it. He’d seen the damage it could do to a weak mind. Was Lambert weak in the mind? He wasn’t sure, sometimes he didn’t think he was, but the mushrooms made him dizzy most days, and sometimes he and the other boys had to spend all day in bed, just vomiting and being miserable.

They found him that night, as they always did. The sky crumbled in on itself as Lambert cried his eyes out, the stars fell down and greeted Lambert eye to eye.

They asked him, “What’s wrong?”

His answer was choked. “They’re going to kill me.”

He didn’t have to say no more. They knew what he meant. They always knew.

They told him, “Fear not, dear boy. You will be safe.”

“How can you know? How can you be so sure?”

“You’re always safe with us. We’ll protect you. You’ll be safe.”

“Why?” Lambert was choking in his own voice—he was pathetic.

“Because you’re ours. As we are yours.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Friends,” was all they said. They did that sometimes. No matter how many times Lambert asked what they meant, they stayed silent.

——

Lambert survived the Trials. He was the only one in his class to do so.

——

(Years later, he would find out it was a marvelous deed. It would be accidental, a drunk Vesemir blabbering his heart out a couple of years after the pogroms. Vesemir would be doing that a lot lately, and Lambert would have his fun asking him about embarrassing stories, past lovers, why he loved that stupid hat so much.

One of these nights, Vesemir would tell him, “It was a marvelous thing. They told us they were doing an experiment, and to not expect any new trainees that year. But then you survived.” Vesemir would hiccup in between his slurred words. “Marvelous indeed, boy. Nobody was expecting it.”

And Lambert, as always, would rage.)

——

Lambert goes to the Stars when the anger is too much, when everything he wants to do is bang skulls on walls until their malicious grey matter can be used for painting.

He goes to them when he feels lonely and desperate.

He goes to them when he wants to scream and bawl like the child he never was, not really, even before he was kidnapped into Kaer Morhen.

He goes to them when he feels like giving up.

They ask him, “What’s wrong?”

Lambert tells them, “I don’t know what to do.”

He tells them, “I lost Aiden.”

He tells them, “I’m losing my mind.”

He tells them, “I’m losing myself.”

They tell him, “You can’t lose what isn’t lost.”

He feels their magic pouring over him, flooding his insides. It’s warm and humbling and terrifyingly comforting, and Lambert lets his guard down for once. He lets the warm sorrow run down his cheeks, melt the everlasting snow of the Blue Mountains in tiny droplets, one at a time. He lets his mind be fogged, lets the pain be lifted away for a couple of hours.

It’s his own version of fisstech.

He wonders, sometimes, when he’s not on top of those mountains, surrounded by the Stars, if he’s doomed.

The thought is an answer by itself: _it’s not like I wasn’t doomed before_.

——

Lambert was in his second year on the Path when he had his first real near-death experience. Katakan, caught him by surprise as he worked on restocking the ingredients for his potions.

A stupid way to die.

 _Serves me right,_ Lambert thought, for insisting on collecting the plants by myself instead of going to the markets like any regular witcher.

That was the day he learned they were always with him. Always.

The sky crumbled in on itself, its stars falling down imperceptibly. They greeted Lambert eye to eye.

They didn’t ask what was wrong that time. He immediately felt the warm pour of healing magic in his veins. It made him tremble.

“Thank you,” he ended up saying that night. The first time he’d ever done it.

“Friends,” was all they said back.

——

Sometimes, Lambert isn’t sure why this is happening.

Sometimes, he isn’t sure of what they really want.

“What do you want from me?” he asks from time to time.

The answer is always the same.

“A friend.”

——

It goes on, though. Every time.

Lambert is hurting, and the Stars heal him.

He is lonely, and the Stars keep him company.

He is desperate, drowning in anguish and hollowness, but the Stars pull him above, force him to breathe conjured fresh air, force his lungs to function, until Lambert can do it by himself again.

——

It’s Eskel who finds them one day.

It doesn’t surprise Lambert in the least—if anything, he’s surprised it took the one good witcher in their lot, the only one who genuinely cares about everyone, not just his personal affairs, to keep tabs on Lambert’s disappearances.

“You followed me,” Lambert says. Not a question.

“What is happening?” Eskel asks, voice cold, calm and collected—the voice of a witcher ready to act. He has his silver sword in his dominant hand.

“Nothing is happening,” Lambert says, the Stars surrounding him dancing in a circle—worried, he knows; it’s their way of urging him to run away.

“Lambert, they are pixies.”

“I know.”

Eskel’s mouth opens and closes several times. There’s a thing Lambert has never seen: Eskel lost for words.

“I read the bestiaries, Eskel,” Lambert decides to offer as a complement in the explanation. “I know what they are.” Quietly, he tells them, “I’ve always known.” They dance faster around him, warmth intensifying. They’re happy.

“W-why?” Eskel asks, incredulous.

Lambert shrugs. “They’re my friends.”

“Lambert—”

“Shut up, Eskel. Sit down. Let me enjoy a moment of peace, will you?”

Lambert can see Eskel is reluctant in doing so, but still he sheaths his sword, and sits down beside Lambert, inside the circle the pixies make around them.

They ask, “Friend?”

“Friend,” Lambert confirms.

“What do they want from you?” Eskel asks quietly.

Lambert shrugs. “Only this,” he says.


End file.
